· 6 min read

How our Free and Premium Services are Evolving in 2021

Our number 1 priority is to help you grow your games. And to that, we've decided to make some changes. To get you up to speed, here's what you can expect to see this year, and why.

2020 has been our most productive year yet. If you’ve been with us for a while, then you’ve probably noticed the amount of updates and releases we’ve done over the last 12 months. With so many products and services now under our belt (and more to come), we wanted to take a moment and share in more detail our vision for the future with you, specifically our products and pricing models. So that you can have a clear picture of exactly where we’re heading as a company.

Hopefully, this should help you build tools and services around our technology stack with the peace of mind that they will be in place and perform well for years to come.

We’ll go over the priorities not only from a product perspective, but also for our team and business. If you’re interested in more details on our product roadmap (specifically the more granular updates and releases), then head to our latest post by Nikolaj, our VP of Product.

But for now, here’s what’s happening…

Our core analytics tool has and will always remain free

Our mission has always been to help developers grow their games. A key step in this process is making sure you always have access to the best-in-class analytics, so that you can make the right decisions for your business. The GameAnalytics tool will remain free. Up to any size. For any number of games or players. This includes our web tool, with all its current dashboards, as well as our mobile app.

You can expect to see more improvements soon for our core toolset, too. We’re currently rebuilding our UI and UX to give you a smoother, more polished experience. New dashboards, custom dashboards, ways to query, and funnels are all priorities for us this year. We’re also focusing on adding more ad revenue sources, and continuing to improve the reports and insights we provide for ad-based monetization.

We will be releasing more premium services

The main goal of our free analytics offering, and any free tier we have within our paid services, is to help indie developers to reach their first hit and be successful. At the same time, we will be releasing more premium services around our core analytics toolset, which we’ll discuss more below.

Our ad ops & game ops will have a freemium model

Our free A/B Testing and Remote Configs belong to a suite of services we call ‘ad ops and game ops’ – a larger product offering that we’ll extend moving forward.

For now, we’re continuing to enrich both of these with new capabilities.  For example, we’ll be adding new prediction models around ad metrics for A/B tests, and working on new ways of reporting to help you clearly tell which game configs have increased LTV.

A premium tier will follow

While we do plan to launch a premium ops tier eventually, we’ll first focus on providing a unified, consistent experience for all of our services with a whole new  UI/UX design. In short, we won’t launch a premium tier until we have a fully fleshed-out new UI, so we can add new types of reporting and insights to bring even more value to our existing features.

Our ops suite will always include a generous free tier. So you’ll still be able to use these features in your games, with the peace of mind that they’re here to stay.

Our DataSuite and programmatic access will be premium services

Our DataSuite offering helps studios and publishers who have already had a first hit to build advanced data and marketing tech stacks quickly and affordably.

The Player Warehouse is an ‘instant data warehouse’ which gives access to player and event-level data, so you can build anything from player funnels to machine learning models without having to go through the effort of collecting, aggregating, and preprocessing data. The Metrics API also provides an easy, robust way to query a studio’s metrics programmatically, and build business intelligence environments with minimum effort.

We’re also working on new automated export services for more granular data sets, including an Event Export, and Raw Export. We’ll share more details with you about these services very soon.

Providing these premium services lets us grow as a business and fund our free analytics offering. There’s no obligation to adopt these services and you could simply use the free analytics for as long as needed. Please note, extracting data programmatically from GameAnalytics isn’t possible with our free offering, and our team will be following fair usage more closely moving forward.

Get in touch if you’re already querying data programmatically

If you’re using one of our free features, but querying it programmatically, then your setup will have to change. Someone from our team may get in touch with you to go over what the next steps would be. That said, if you do have a setup like this, please let us know immediately, rather than waiting to be contacted. Otherwise, you may find that one day your trusty scraper or exporter stops working.

New account management, game and data sharing

As data privacy requirements on studios increase, we’re working on adding new capabilities which will make it easier to manage access to your games (and your data). A key priority for us this year is to help organizations share their games amongst themselves while also having more control over what type of data specifically is shared.

These capabilities will be part of our free offering. For large-scale programmatic access, we may provide premium APIs, if there’s sufficient demand from our community for doing so.

We’re still GameAnalytics

We know that there’s a lot to take in. But the fundamentals of GameAnalytics remain the same. We’re committed to helping developers grow their games, and we want to provide a great technology tool kit for studios and publishers to grow, once they’ve had their first hit.

We’re still a small team ourselves, and we work very hard to make GameAnalytics the best analytics service in the world for mobile game developers. As we’re doing this, we’re also working to build a healthy technology business, so we can be around for years and continue to support our kickass community. We hope we’ll have your full support along the way, and we’ll do our absolute best to deserve it.